It would not be all right if there were not some way to get out of it. But if I remember correctly your parents were able to get a permit from the government so that your parents could unschool you.
I think there should be laws that make sure kids receive an education, in school or at home, and I do think that if someone is at a bad school and is being bullied he should be able to either go to another school or be home schooled, and most systems allow for that.
And anyway, life in this world is not a piece of cake, and if you don't get used it and how cruel other people can be sometimes - well how are you ever going to learn?

A system that forced kids to go their local school, even if they were being bullied there, would be terrible indeed.

I agree with emma. In most of the countries represented here, we have the option of either sending the kids to a different school or keeping them at home for their education.

If children are being abused in school, the problem is not with the law requiring that they go--the problem is with the environment and administration of the school, and that can be changed through other means. Requiring that they go to school is not in itself an immoral law, nor is it abusive of human rights, especially since most of us consider one of those rights to be a right to education. :)

why should there be a law that makes poeple get education? what if all they want to be is housekeepers?

it is entirely up to the individual to decide whether they want to get education or not. and, the schools do not give education - they force you to think in thought patterns that might not fit you at all. those people who think differently are labeld "Dislectic", when many people just think differently.
it also just forces kids to memorize facts that are not at all interesting for most of them. that way they just forget it as soon as possible. school just doesn't work. it is like a experiment thats being repeated again and again, even though the result fails to satisfy. like giving cows meat loaf. most die, (i don't know the real result of such a test - just using it as an analogy) and only a small percent survive. nevertheless, the test is being repeated over and over again. sometimes they try adding sugar, or corn to the test, but nothing changes.

and regarding the fact that the world is cruel - it wouldn't be as cruel if kids would be treated as human beings and not robots. they have their needs and wants, and we cannot try to force what we think is right (education) on them. think of what a child, uncapable of understanding why he has to sit for hours and hours each day, and get humiliated in public (when the teacher asks a question and then when the kid doesn't know, the teacher mocks him). think of how it makes a child feel when they ask their parents over and over again, not to abuse him, and they just ignore his cries for help. school is one of the big (if not the biggest) frauds of them all - it fails to supply any of its targets to most the children.

If a teacher mocks students for giving wrong answers, the teacher should be disciplined.
If a student gets bullied, the bullies need disciplining.
These measures might not always be succesful in which case different options may have to be pursued.
To state that -because a child doesn't want to learn something he/she shouldn't be forced to-, is closer to child abuse due to negligence than forcing a child to learn is to an abuse of power.
Compare letting a child eat potato chips for supper with licorice as dessert because he does not like spinach and apples.
Bert.

There is one thing you are forgetting here - you're talking about the child making a choice. The child may not know what it wants to do when it grows up, if it wants to be a housekeeper or not. Probably wants to be the owner of chocolate factory at that age. It's the parents that make the decisions. If the state wasn't there to force parents to send their kids to school, there would be loads of kids working or stuck at home doing housework, when they would much rather be in school learning new things with their friends. And school's not hell, either, don't really know why you think it is.
I know what you mean, when you talk about the thought patterns, though. But sooner of later they will adopt though patterns whatever. Which patterns these are, are never for the child to choose. It depends who they're with, who they talk to, who guides them. At least at school there will be many teachers, who think differently, not just their parents for example.

I am not forgetting that.
unschooling is not a mere change of the place the child spends his time in - it's a different way of life. it's about allowing the child to learn about the world the way he/she wants to. children do learn to read, for instance, regardless of school. when out of school they learn it when they are ripe for it, and not when some pedagog decides they need to. they learn it because in our world written words are everywhere - not knowing to read is almost as worse as not knowing to speak. and children wish to do what their parents do, so if a parent can read, the child will learn to read, and that is if that parent is aware of those things and allows the child to observe him.

one of the u.s. presidents (can't remember who at the moment) only learnd to read after the age of 10 (12 or 13 i think).

i think that this is succes that no one can denie, and it also proves that no knowledge has to be forced into anyone. i it is, they just cease to have hunger for more knowledge, like those poor geese that are being over fed.

and it is true that a child doesn't know what he will want to be. thats why he doesn't have to learn everything in the world!
he can wait till he is old enough and then do what ever they wish to. i know much more things then many kids i know -and more important - i want to know. i am interested in the world and that is grately due to the fact that i haven't been forced to be.

Children do have certain rights, yes. Those rights include food, shelter, nurturing care, etc. However, children also have parents, and the *purpose* of parents is to make decisions which the child is not yet capable of making. Children *often* have to be forced (not in an abusive way, of course) to do things they don't want to do, simply because they are *children* and do NOT know what's best for them. Children need to be given structure, boundaries, and rules. It is indisputable that children who are given no boundaries and direction (and discipline) end up with behavioural problems and low self esteem. We force them to eat healthily. We force them to take baths, share their toys, get along with siblings, let us know where they are and who their friends are, and help out around the house. We also force them to be educated. Anything less than these basic actions constitutes neglect, and is ultimately harmful to the child.

Forcing these things is not abuse--it's parenting. The goal is to make them confident, educated, well-adjusted, and productive members of society.

I disagree with you there mingshey, as that's what it's like here in the MSS (Mainz education system). The teachers can pretty much do what they like, teach what the like, take as much time to teach it as they think is right, make the lessons as hard as they think they should be and so on...
Instead of making life better it just makes it very, very unfair. You only really profit from that system if you have an extremely good teacher, but well... they seem to be quite rare. In most cases you end up not learning what you need to learn and it also means that some teacher choose to teach the class nothing at all, because they can't be bothered. The difference between my German class and the other German class in my year is incredible. Whereas we learn just as much as those, who choose to take German as a main subject (he works us much too hard), the other class know nothing at all, not even the basics. We read 6 books last year and they read 2 (and 2 quite useless ones at that). Believe me, a loose curriculum is not a good idea at all.

Last edited by Emma_85 on Wed Oct 15, 2003 6:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Obviously the school systems all have issues and need to be changed in certain ways. However, the question was whether or not it is abusive simply to require that children be educated, and to that I still say no. The solution is not to stop requiring education--it is to make improvements to the established education system.

You are right in a sense, Emma. But what I had in mind was something different. The educational system now allows the chance of education for almost only fixed period of your life. Once you graduate and get a job, you can hardly have a dedicated period of time(months, a couple of year or so) to be re-educated unless you have some fortune and quit the job. And the reeducation tends to be focused on vocational subjects. It's a problem of whole system, not the problem of how to arrange a specific curriculum in a school.
The system should allow people to change between working and learning periods more freely. And then the problem of forced education will be reduced when the student realized certain need of learning. Well, this is not an easy problem, and rebuttals are welcome.

I don't believe that forcing a child to learn is immoral-not at all! I can't count the number of lessons I would have skipped, and gladly, if Mamma hadn't made me sit down and do them. However, I do think that forcing a child to attend school[/] is immoral, wrong, bad, nasty and horrible. I'm not decrying public schools, or even private schools, this time around. But if a child is being bullied, if she's falling behind, if the teacher, well-intentioned but so very, very busy, can't rectify the situation-the child needs to come out. And it happens in private schools, not just public education. But it seems to me that you guys are missing the middle ground.

Kalailan speaks of unschooling, which is good in principle, but imposes absolutely [I]no habits on a child, and doesn't train him in the use of his will. (Young children have strong wills; any mother can tell you that. Better, I think, that some training be applied so that the child can learn to use that will for good, and not against it.) Emma refers to public school, and you already know what I think of that. But everyone is forgetting homeschooling. It takes the child out of the environment where he or she has been languishing, and still gives clear bounds, and does force certain things, certain habits. With us, for example, we could do our schoolwork any time of the morning we liked...but it absolutely had to be done before noon. If ten o'clock came and we hadn't started yet, Mamma made us sit down and do it. (That was when we were younger, and only had about two hours worth of school work to do.) When I was about twelve, we switched curriculums, which gave me a total of about four and a half hours of school work over an entire day. By this time, I was learning self-discipline, which made it much easier.

My schooling left me plenty of time for play as a child, but as I grew older, it left me plenty of time for other things, like working towards my career goals and serving an apprenticeship under my mother. (Working and learning, you see, Mingshey.)

Of course, homeschooling isn't for everyone. Mamma quit her job so that she could stay home and school us-and we're a single-parent family. She has her own business now, and works out of the home, but for a while things were very rough, both financially and emotionally speaking. You have to be a very dedicated parent, I think, in order to do that, and most parents today just-won't.

I, of course, agree with you in the matter of school, keesa.
but i believe that as you said, children have a lot of willpower.
when a child finds out what he/she wishes to do they will do a lot for it.
i, for instance, go on a 3.5 hour drive by bus each week to get violin lessons and play in a quartet and an orchestra. when i go, i have to stay there from thursday to sunday at my aunt's. its quite hard, especially with all the times i have to stay extra time or go extra times, but i do it because i really want to. and my sister also stays only four days once every two weeks, and she is only 14.
i think that if a child is let to develop and grow up mentally he/she will become strong enough to do whatever they want.

I agree with that. However, I also feel that it's important that the parents help a child to develop their willpower, and I think that sometimes entails making them do what they don't want to do. It's the only reason I prefer homeschooling over unschooling.